Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of politics
- Chapter 2 The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre
- Chapter 3 Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin's Caleb Williams
- Chapter 4 ‘The Prometheus of Sentiment’: Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education
- Chapter 5 Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the population controversy
- Chapter 6 ‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth and the politics of the Mountain
- Chapter 7 ‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and the resistance to reform
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of politics
- Chapter 2 The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre
- Chapter 3 Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin's Caleb Williams
- Chapter 4 ‘The Prometheus of Sentiment’: Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education
- Chapter 5 Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the population controversy
- Chapter 6 ‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth and the politics of the Mountain
- Chapter 7 ‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and the resistance to reform
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome, and almost intolerable.
Surprisingly, perhaps, given the mythic status he now enjoys as the archetype of the modern scientist, the protagonist of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) has an approach to science that is decidedly anti-modern. In the early part of his confessional narrative Victor describes how his project to re-animate the dead was initially inspired by the study of writers such as Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, a group of mystics and alchemists considered by his tutor the ‘progressive’ Professor Krempe to be ‘as musty as they are ancient’. For Frankenstein, however, they display a holism that is noticeably lacking in the disciples of modern natural philosophy:
It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth. (27)
Even after having been persuaded of the value of modern experimental techniques by the sympathetic Mr Waldman, Victor does not abandon his pursuit of the ancient ideal.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism , pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999